LITMIR.BIZ

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hairs bristling along its appendages. “It’s beautiful,” he said.

      She started slightly. “That’s not what I expect to hear when people look at this one.”

      He glanced at her. “The care you put into it makes it beautiful. It shows respect.”

      She hugged her arms, surprised at the tingle that ran along her shoulders and spine. “I think...that’s one of the nicest things anyone’s ever said about my work. Thank you.”

      “You’re cold?” He set the book aside, tugged his jacket from her grasp and shook it out to put over her shoulders. “Now I know how you found me.”

      “I haven’t been gone so long that I don’t still know the gossip hub for this town,” Regan agreed. She pulled another of her father’s bandannas from the jacket pocket, unrolling it to pick out a piece of thick, spiced jerky and offering it to him.

      He grinned and took it, biting off a chunk with efficiency. Regan had to work harder on hers, and for a moment they simply savored the burst of flavor, the spring air growing cooler as the low sun settled farther, the quiet steps on the library walk behind them and the squeak and scuff of the door.

      When Regan swallowed, she said, “There was a Realtor out nosing around the house yesterday.”

      “He bothered you?” Kai went still in a way that felt more dangerous than quiet.

      “Not like that,” Regan said hastily, divining his thoughts from that expression. “But yes. Just a feeling...thought I’d see what I could learn about him.”

      Kai’s silence was as good as a question.

      “Nothing so far. But I’m just getting started. I’m afraid I’ll have to bother my dad about it.”

      “Say hello to him for me.” Kai closed the Things that Sting book and smoothed a hand over the protected cover.

      Regan couldn’t hide her jolt of surprise. “You really know my dad?”

      Kai grinned. “Frank? Yes. Do you think you’re the only one who walks out into the woods from your home?”

      Regan wanted to blurt “Yes!” because when she’d left this place, Frank had done most of his appreciating from the porch with a young Bob. And before that, her mother had walked the land. And Regan herself, but less so as her mother grew ill, and—

      Kai closed his eyes, and for the moment his face was full of pain. His breath caught, his body stilled—for an instant, he was everything that was quiet, his striking face turned slightly to the mountain, his body beneath its camouflage of blue T-shirt and jeans a thing of wild beauty.

      For a dumbstruck instant, she stared. And as she opened her mouth for a concerned question, she heard it. Deep inside her head, nearly subliminal...the faintest ponderous moan, a sound that carried all the weight of the world.

      She closed her mouth on her question. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know. And Kai now looked at her as if nothing had happened at all—as if the extra cast of pale strain around his eyes was only an effect of the light.

      And while she tried to discern if he’d been in discomfort from his arm or if he’d felt what she’d felt—sooner and deeper, for this man who lived in the land that spoke to her—he asked her, “What happened to your mother, Regan?”

      In an intuitive rush, she understood too many things. That her father had never answered this question for Kai, if indeed Kai had asked it. That Kai had come here not to look at Things that Sting, but to check the news archives for background information.

      She didn’t quite get up, but the space between them had grown less companionable and more like the stiffness of strangers.

      “Look it up,” she told him shortly. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

      “I’m here because this is a place that I come.” Kai set the book aside and lifted his arms in a startling stretch, one that took her by surprise both because of its casual nature in the middle of a conversation suddenly turned tense, and because of its utter unself-conscious completeness. His chest expanded; his shirt lifted, revealing a narrow line of unexpectedly pale, crisp hair. When he finally lowered his arms and tugged his shirt back into place, he looked at her. “And I got distracted by your paintings.”

      Somewhat savagely, she stuffed her father’s bandanna back into the jacket pocket. “What does it matter what happened to my mother?”

      Kai made as though to lean back on his arms, winced, and stayed as he’d been. “It matters to you,” he observed. “Maybe it matters to others.”

      She snorted and abruptly got to her feet, shedding his jacket along the way and holding it out to him. “That’s no answer at all.”

      “It’s an honest answer,” he told her, scooping up the book and rising in one fluid motion that somehow didn’t involve uncrossing his legs until he was already up. “It’s just not the one you wanted to hear.”

      She found herself full of glare and bereft of words—of sensible words. So she held her silence and held the jacket out to him again.

      “Just a minute,” he said as if she wasn’t angry at all. Perfectly civilized, this version of Kai Faulkes, as he jogged to the library, briefly disappeared inside and reemerged to join her again. “No ID,” he said upon returning. “No library card. Sometimes Miss Laura uses her own card for me, but I try not to ask too often.”

      The enigma of Kai. She told herself she didn’t care, and tried to believe it. She had a righteous anger, by golly, and she wasn’t through with it.

      “Take the damned jacket,” she said, holding it out a third time. “I’ve got work to do at home. I need to go.” She’d intended to stay longer—to nose around further. To reacquaint herself with the town and look harder for Arshun’s realty offices. But now she thought she’d call her father first.

      Her father, who had known of Kai and not warned her.

      Kai might have taken the garment, if he hadn’t stumbled—if he hadn’t nearly gone down, no warning of it on his face and none of his usual lethal grace in his staggering attempt to catch himself.

      Regan caught him instead—a quick step, a shift of her hip against his, and it was enough so he found himself again, looking vague and baffled beneath the strain. Before he could object, she reached across his body and took his wrist, tugging enough to turn him—to see what she hadn’t noticed until now. “This should have stopped bleeding hours ago.”

      He looked down on it. “Yes,” he said distantly. “But it’s not that bad.”

      She glared at him. “One stupid man thing after another. You’re losing all the points you earned this morning, Kai Faulkes. Did you or did you not almost just pass out?”

      He seemed to come back to himself. “Stupid man thing?” he said, and not without humor.

      “Don’t even try to change the subject. Yes, stupid man thing—refusing to see a doctor, checking me out behind my back, pretending you’re not really hurt.”

      “Regan,” he said, “just because a bullet made that scrape doesn’t—” But he stopped, and his gaze jerked back out to the mountain—back toward home. For the briefest moment his jaw tightened; his nostrils flared. When he spoke, it sounded like more of an effort to keep his voice even, and she would have given anything to understand where his thoughts had gone. “That doesn’t make it worse than it really is.”

      With reluctance, she had to concede that point. It had been a deep gouge and ugly, but she’d done as much to herself in childhood falling out of a tree. She released his arm—noting with some absent part of her mind that he’d given it to her without resistance, that he’d allowed her to keep it.

      She thought perhaps that particular surrender had been a gift on his part.

      Now she didn’t wait for him to take the

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